"It is the duty of every man, as far as his ability extends, to detect and expose delusion and error"..Thomas Paine

SCOTUS Humps Workers

While you were pissing and moaning about the SCOTUS ruling on voters rights or celebrating their ruling on DOMA, they were screwing the American worker……

In the first case, Vance v. Ball State University, the court ruled workers only are protected against a supervisor who has the power to make “significant change in [your] employment status, such as hiring, firing, failing to promote, reassignment with significantly different responsibilities, or a decision causing a significant change in benefits” or if the company ignores the fact a supervisor without this power is engaging in harassment. This very narrow definition of “supervisor” makes remedying harassment more difficult and ignores the reality that many supervisors without hiring and firing power have the ability to make an employee’s life much more difficult.

The second case, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, eliminated so called “mixed motive” retaliation claims under existing anti-discrimination law. Employees who pursue discrimination claims now will have to prove that discrimination was the sole thing on their boss’s mind when they were fired or demoted. Previously, discrimination only had to be one factor involved in punishing an employee and bosses were required to reveal what they were thinking at the time of the punishment. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out in her dissent, that standard is almost impossible to meet, since few people in the real world are motivated by a single cause.

Not much to celebrate there now is there?

The Righties are winning their war on labor and the workers….and we seem to be blind to all these efforts while we stroke out over background checks or voters rights or we pee all over ourselves with a minor victory in same sex marriage……all these worker hostile issues that the GOP is winning is doing what it intended…making of a low paid worker that has no rights and has only the ‘mercy’ of the employers whims….this benefits no one but corporations and it does not create jobs that would give the worker a liveable wage……

8 thoughts on “SCOTUS Humps Workers”

I would like your permission to copy this verbatim – – give you credit for it – – and re-publish it on “Progressive Liberal Democrat.” This is some important stuff that many people just might find themselves sleeping through or not paying enough attention to.

No offense, but Vance is essentially in line with previous legal definitions of ‘supervisors.’ With the exception of the EOC, which itself never successfully lobbied the expanded definition the minority opinion of the court tried to utilize, there is simply no other ‘authority’–and I’ll allow you to define that term however broadly you want–who has made a conclusive argument for why the definition of ‘supervisor’ should be larger than the court’s majority opinion delivered.

You can look through all the past court decisions, and there is simply nothing of the sort that expands the word ‘supervisor’ beyond the precedent reaffirmed by the court in that case.